Long Summer Day (58 page)

‘You can’t never get to that beach from the top,’ Tozer protested. ‘There baint no way down and with the tide running how can any of us get into the bliddy Cove, save by boat?’

Williams said soberly, ‘Tamer Potter got there, Abe! Tell him to show ’ee the way while I get a boat party together. Has anyone told Squire?’

‘Aye,’ Tozer said, ‘Hazel Potter is there now. Well, good luck to ’ee, I’ll do the best I can!’ and he ran back to The Raven, where a party led by Eph Morgan, the builder, had already assembled. They set off across the headland at once and on the way somebody thought to call in and leave a message with Doctor O’Keefe, telling the old man to prepare for casualties. They were leaving the street for the path to the headland when Abe Tozer’s boy, a notable hunter of gull’s eggs, had another thought and doubled back, rejoining them later with his thirty-foot rope-ladder.

III

P
aul at once recognised the shipwreck as yet another of these sudden crises he had been called upon to face at intervals during the last four years and yet, for the first time, there was a difference, for here was a challenge that involved not only him but every able-bodied man and woman in the Valley and it was because of this that he could meet it with more cool-headedness than when caught up in the Smut Potter scandal, or the fatal madness of Martin Codsall, or even the quarrel that caused the split of the Four Winds family. For here, at last, was something that demanded swift planning and resolute action, something akin to a junior officer’s work in the field and whilst with one half of his mind he was issuing orders and making the decisions necessary to rally the manpower of the estate, at a deeper level of consciousness he was uplifted as he had not been for close on two years.

He was standing talking to Rudd in the stable-yard when Hazel Potter came panting out of the mist with news of shipwreck off Coombe Bluff, and at once Paul acted entirely on his own initiative, without consulting his agent. His first impulse was to ride for the village but when Hazel said her sister was already on her way there he gave the child a moment to catch her breath and then questioned her patiently, whilst John called for Chivers and together they saddled Snowdrop, the agent’s bay, the youngest of the cobs and the trap pony. Hazel, who soon recovered from her cross-country run from the Dell to Shallowford, could not tell them much, for Tamer had been badly blown when he came with the news and had despatched his daughters in all directions without telling them more than the barest facts. In addition, Hazel Potter’s brogue was the thickest in the Valley and sometimes almost unintelligible. Paul gathered, however, that Coombe Bay had been alerted, the coastguard and police almost certainly informed by telephone, that Sam Potter would soon be on the spot, and that under the Bluff were an unknown number of persons in imminent danger of drowning. He made his dispositions accordingly, despatching Chivers to summon all the available men and two carts to the Dell, instructing him to call at the Home Farm, Hermitage, and Four Winds, in that order, before riding to the edge of the moor to fetch Will Codsall. Chivers rode off at once on Rudd’s bay and before setting out for the Dell, where he hoped Potter or his wife would have more detailed information, Paul told Mrs Handcock to prepare guest rooms and make a cauldron of pea soup against the probability of visitors. He would have taken rope from the stables but the girl said, breathlessly, ‘Dornee bother, Squire! Pa will ha’ taaken rorpe, Pa’s got bushels o’ rorpe!’ so they cantered off unencumbered, Hazel leading the way through the mist as far as the junction of the Dell cart-track where Rudd pulled up and said, ‘I’d better check on the village, Paul. They’ll send out a boat party no doubt!’ but Paul replied, ‘Not until ebb tide, John! There’s no power-driven boat in Coombe Bay and no one could pull round under Coombe Bluff against a flowing tide!’ and as he said this he was surprised by his instinctive knowledge of local conditions. Later that night Rudd was to remember this and say to himself ‘By God! And he has talked to me about throwing his hand in! He’s been here less than four years but he knows the ebb and flow of the tides as well as Potter!’ He said, ‘Lead on then, and we’ll hope to God they had the sense to make straight for the headland and bring along tackle. All I hope is that she’s struck well to the east, where we can climb down to the beach!’

They found the Potter farmhouse deserted, although the doors were open and the lamp was still burning in the kitchen and for a moment Paul was baffled. The mist was shredding a little here but visibility was still reduced to yards. The girl said, in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘They’m gone upalong! And they’ve taaken rorpe, like I told ’ee!’

It was this second reference to ropes that gave Paul a clue she was holding something back. In general with the rest of the Valley he had always regarded Hazel Potter as a halfwit, and partly because of this and partly because he was worried by the time factor, he seized her by the arm, shaking her impatiently.

‘Do you
know
where the wreck is, Hazel?’ he demanded. ‘Can’t you tell us exactly where your father and mother have gone?’ and the girl said sullenly, ‘Arr, us knaws! But he’ll flay the hide off me if taakes ’ee there!’

‘But you’ve got to take us, Hazel,’ he said. ‘People are out there, drowning at this moment!’

‘Wait a minute, Paul,’ John said as he edged his cob alongside the pony. ‘Listen, Hazel, your father told you to take Squire to wherever he’s gone, didn’t he?’

‘Arr,’ said the girl, hesitantly, ‘he did that, but tiz funny for he zed hed flay the hide offen any one of us who chattered?’

‘What the devil is she talking about?’ Paul demanded irritably, but John readdressed himself earnestly to the girl. ‘I
know
about that, Hazel! Tamer knows a way to the Cove and you know a way to the Cove but the Squire will give your father the Cove if you take us there now, do you understand?’

‘Will ’ee zo?’ said Hazel, looking wonderingly at Paul, and Paul, only half comprehending, hastily endorsed the promise and at this Hazel seemed satisfied and said, ‘Well, get along then and I’ll show ’ee the tunnel, an iffen ’er belts me for showing ’ee I’ll run off to the woods ’till ’ers safe an’ drunk again!’, and she clapped her heels into the pony and trotted off up the steepest side of the Dell and over several Potter hedgerows to the level ground of the cliff-top.

Up here the visibility was better and they could hear the roar of the breakers under the Bluff. John said, ‘We’re damned near the edge, Paul, take it easy and let the girl lead. I’ve always had my suspicions about Tamer’s unwillingness to cultivate these fields and it takes a shipwreck to prove them justified!’, but before Paul could answer Willoughby’s bewhiskered face loomed out of the fog and he called in a high-pitched voice, ‘Praise God you’ve come, Squire! Potter and his wife went down nearly an hour since, leaving me to show others the way! It’s yonder, through the gorse to the head of that dry gully and after that the Lord go with you, for it’s more than a hundred feet and close on sheer!’

‘Great God, that’s suicide in this mist,’ Rudd exclaimed. ‘They’ve gone to their deaths!’ but Willoughby said, civilly, ‘No, Mr Rudd, sir, they took ropes and Meg Potter came back to tell me she would wait by the steepest part to help others down! She’s there now, I believe, at the head of the gully!’

Paul peered over the belt of gorse but it was impossible to judge the angle of the cliff. Rudd said, ‘If you go, I’m coming with you, Paul!’ but Paul, turning back to him, replied, ‘You damned well won’t, John! You’re over fifty and that’s a young man’s climb in the mist or in the clear! Wait here with Willoughby and send some of the young men down if they’ve got the stomach for it! As for the girl …’ and he turned to the thicket just in time to see Hazel’s heels disappearing through a hole in the gorse and went after her, crawling on hands and knees along a tunnel less than two feet high until he could hear the voice of Meg Potter chiding her daughter from a perch about half-way down the cliff. A moment later he was beside them on a small platform of sandstone over which two ropes had been flung, the ends running back into the bushes.

Meg said, in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Oh, tiz you, Squire! Well, my man needs help below but if so you’d sooner bide here me and the maid’ll go down. Thicky tide has about an hour to flow!’

‘Have you made contact with the poor devils?’ he asked and Meg said she believed not, apart from the initial exchange of shouts when Tamer first located them.

‘I’ll go down at once,’ Paul told her. ‘You and the girl stay here and guide the others,’ and he seized the ropes and lowered himself over the ledge, hanging by his hands until his feet found partial holds in the clefts each side of the gully.

It was, as Willoughby had said, almost sheer but the surface was rough and the descent was not as fearful as he had anticipated, although how anyone had ever managed it without the ropes he could not begin to think. Then, when he was part way down, a soft orange glow showed through the mist, and then another and a third, and he realised Tamer must be lighting fires along the beach and using fuel more inflammable than driftwood. As soon as his feet touched shingle he saw Potter’s thick-set figure silhouetted between the cliff and the most easterly of his fires and smelled the sharp tang of burning pitch. Tamer called, ‘Who is it?’ and he called back, ‘It’s me, Tamer, Squire!’ and Tamer came crunching over the loose shingle looking, Paul thought, preoccupied but by no means excited.

‘Rudd’s on top and others are coming down as soon as they get here,’ he told him. ‘Are they still alive out there?’

‘Aye, they’m there,’ Tamer said, ‘but whether there’s two or dree or a dozen I can’t say in this bliddy ole fog! They’ll do ’till the tide’s full but if us don’t get ’em off the ebb will taake ’em as far as Conger Rocks. I reckon they was comin’ ashore from there in a boat when they capsized on the rocks yonder!’ and he cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed, ‘Ahoy there! Dornee move! Us is comin’ for ’ee!’ There was a faint answering hail and Tamer turned back to Paul. ‘It baint a particle o’ gude waitin’ for the lifeboat,’ he said. ‘Us’ll have to taake a chance on it an’ use my boat paid out on cable from the western zide o’ the cove.’

‘You’ve got a boat down here?’

‘Aye,’ said Tamer reluctantly, ‘but us can’t use un ’till others get here. Then, wi’ one other along o’ me, and a shore party holding us, I could let her drift downalong ’till us touched the rocks an’ maybe bring off dree or fower of ’em.’

They stood facing the sea for a moment, seeing nothing but the dense wreaths of mist and occasionally the cream-flecked crest of a wave as it crashed on to the shingle and beach debris. Paul said, finally, ‘Show me the boat,’ and Tamer led the way along the beach just as a rattle of stones higher up announced the arrival of the first newcomer at the foot of the descent.

IV

T
he alerting of the Valley beginning with Violet Potter’s arrival in Coombe Bay, and carried inland by Paul’s despatch of Chivers to rouse the farms, was not really a haphazard operation. It had about it a speed and precision absent from the war games of professional generals working with trained soldiers and this was because, basically, it was a tribal exercise, performed by men who had been dependent upon one another’s goodwill all their lives. The impulse to unite in a common cause was in their blood and bone and although, in fact, twentieth-century apparatus had been employed to summon Whinmouth lifeboat and coastguard, these factors played no part in the attempt to rescue eight men and one woman, marooned on a shelf of rock eighty yards seaward of Tamer’s Cove and invisible behind the veils of mist. The feat was achieved by the people of the Valley and was due not so much to the courage and ingenuity of a sixty-year-old gypsy farmer and his twenty-six-year-old landlord, or even to the men who controlled the boat from the beach, but to the tribal instinct that had assembled them on an inaccessible stretch of shore in a little over one hour from the moment Tamer had galloped into the Dell with news that men were needed and time was short.

The Whinmouth lifeboat crew spent the whole of that wild night circling the hulk of the
Sulzbach
that was straddled on Conger Rocks, three miles south-east of the Cove but rescued nobody, for there was no one alive on the wreck. It was only when dawn came that they were able to recover two or three bodies from the sandbank inside the bar and cruise off-shore, watching Tom Williams’ boats move in and pick up the stranded survivors, and such of their rescuers who preferred to return to Coombe Bay by sea rather than tackle the ascent of the gully after such a strenuous night. Then the lifeboat rounded the Bluff to put into the little harbour and its crew learned what had happened but by that time the story was known as far away as Paxtonbury.

The alarm had travelled the Valley in a wide circle, using the reverse route of gulls flying inshore when gales cut them off from their offshore feeding-grounds. The gulls always flew in on the wind, north-east from Coombe Bay to the Coombe farms, then west from Derwent’s yard across the woods to the big house before passing Priory Wood to the Hermitage, and finally over the Sorrel to Four Winds and south to the coast. The cry for manpower took the opposite course, beginning at the Dell and moving via the big house across the river to Four Winds, then back again to Hermitage and Periwinkle Farms and finally over the woods to Derwent’s farm at High Coombe. This clockwise circuit had an unlooked-for advantage. It meant men like Hugh Derwent, and the younger Willoughby, were the last to learn of the shipwreck but they had less than half the distance to travel to the shelf below the rabbit run, where Meg Potter remained all night lowering gear and showing the more awkward among them how to descend the gully. This was why widely scattered units arrived more or less together just as dusk was setting in and the wind was getting up, dissolving some of the sea-fog but driving the full tide hard among the boulders of the cove.

The Coombe Bay party, seven or eight in all, were the first to cross the headland and grope their way down the cliff path to the spot where Rudd and Willoughby awaited them. They had between them more than a hundred yards of good rope and a small inflatable canvas raft of doubtful age. They also had Davy Tozer’s rope ladder, which proved invaluable in replacing the last two lengths of Tamer’s rope and thus adding forty feet of cable to the coil on the beach. Rudd took charge of the cliff-top team and nobody questioned his authority when he told them Squire Craddock was already on the beach. The younger men, like Davy Tozer and Walt Pascoe thought little enough of the descent but some of the others, Eph Morgan, the builder, and Rudd himself, could not have attempted it had not Tamer pioneered the climb. In the red glow of the flaming canisters those at the top could just make out Squire and Tamer working at something wedged in a cleft under the shoulder of the headland and at first supposed them to be trying artificial respiration on somebody washed ashore. Then, after Davy and Walt Pascoe had gone down and secured the ladder to the shelf, Hugh Derwent appeared out of the mist and after him young Willoughby and then, in ones and twos, Will Codsall, who had had the longest ride, Sam Potter, Arthur Pitts and Henry, and Old Honeyman, with the shepherd twins, Matt and Luke. Last of all came Eveleigh with his eldest boy Gil and his two hired men, Ben and Gerry. Rudd, now using Hazel Potter to maintain contact between cliff-top and Meg’s shelf, sent the most active of them down to the beach as soon as they appeared and when he saw they had arrived safely he said to Willoughby, ‘You take over here, Edwin, and send a message when you get news of the boats. I’m going down myself.’ Willoughby did not try to dissuade him and would have followed had not Rudd forbidden it. A responsible man was needed at the top, for hope that the lifeboat would arrive offshore before high tide had now faded and Davy Tozer, who made nothing of the climb, had come up again with news that Potter had a skiff in the cove and they were about to attempt a direct rescue with a paid-out cable.